Forum Integration: HELPING HINTS

I notice that this forum thing is really not that easy for everyone to put in place and I had to do it several times myself to get it working properly. What worked on one server didn’t work as planned on another one. Strange, but I thought I would write this to see if it helps anyone out.

Integration Assumptions:

First off, this assumes that you are using SVN of bbPress of at LEAST 1.0 alpha 4 and nothing less. Do not try this on bbPress alpha 7 when it is released! No more than alpha 6. Buddypress beta or SVN as well. I also haven’t tested this without at least having bbPress using the WPMU user tables for integration. You also NEED to be running WPMU 2.7+ SVN or WPMU 2.7 Branch until the release of WPMU 2.7.1 as it doesn’t work on earlier versions of WPMU.

*** these are requirements for running the bp-forums integration, not buddypress in general! ***

bbPress Side (First):

1) you have bbpress installed and a new user created on the “bbPress” side which you granted “administrator” rights by the keymaster

2) you copy the “buddypress-enable.php” plugin out of the bp-forums folders and copy it into your /my-plugins/ folder (create if it doesn’t exist) so it is /my-plugins/buddypress-enable.php ****People ask about /bb-plugins/ versus /my-plugins/ and put it in /my-plugins/

3) Enable the plugin through your bbPress administration side for plugins

4) Edit “settings” to enable xmlrpc and pingbacks (both)

5) edit your bb-config.php and just before the closing php call at the bottom of the page put:

$bb->bb_xmlrpc_allow_user_switching = true;

buddypress Side (Second):

6) Go into your main blog dashboard as the “site-admin” and go to the “bbPress Forums” page. Put in the URL of your forum like http://yoursite.com/forums/ and make sure you have the ending slash on that one.

7) Put in the user that you created in step 1 with the bbPress “administration” rights and their password. I never changed the password, just used the random one it sent me, but it is up to you. I usually save it a couple of times to ensure it was entered due to a refreshing bug at time of writing this.

Go to one of your groups (new or existing) and go to the group admin page. Make sure “discussion” is turned off. If it was already off that is fine, but if it was enabled already, turn it off

9) Turn the group “discussion” back on and then physically go to your forums URL and see if it created the forum on the bbPress side without trying to create a new topic on the buddypress side.

If you have the new forum now, then you should skip to step 10. If not, go through steps 1-9 again and make sure you got all the steps perfectly.

10) If you have made it this far, it will work, but I like to create the first post in the new forum on the bbPress side and then see if it shows up in the buddypress group forum. Old habit, but for odd circumstance, it seems to work best for me. If it works, try creating a new topic on the group you have working.

***Don’t forget that you have to do step 8 for every group that was created before you enabled the forum integration! Very important***

Other notes:

1) The refreshing bug in step 7 killed it for me a couple of times and I made sure I saved it at least 2 times.

2) Forgetting the line in bb-config.php killed it for me a couple of times as well.

3) In one install I had to change the bbPress “user” with administration rights password and on the bbPress side and then completing step 7 again.

4) I also found that through “previous testing” I had some bp_groupmeta entries that were screwing things up with duplicates for the same forum in the database. Shouldn’t happen to anyone else, but that screwed some things up for me as well.

In terms of having buddypress and bbPress working together, I am sure it works with buddypress on one server and bbPress on another since it works through the xmlrpc module which makes it very powerful.

Let me know if I am out to lunch as well or you have anything else to add!

Hi I have noted that with mu 2.7 branch you cannot deactivate a group and then activate it as it does not create the group at bbpress. I can only create a group/forum when I delete and recreate from scratch.

A little thing like that is enough to drive us to drink @gordon Bunker! Glad to hear you sorted it out. I am actually working on “yet another” revision of this post and will make sure that I add that in. Appreciate you telling us.

yeah, I installed about 6+ times and made it work in the end, but don\’t know what the difference is to the 5 times before that. I was going to write down the exact steps I used but then it was so late and promptly forgotten the next day and now it\’s a week later and gosh, no way to exactly trace back… the only thing I remember was that I simplified and actually did LESS than some of the posts suggest. also, as with the alpha I was constantly getting \’table not found\’ error regarding the user table during install, so I ended up not going with 2 db\’s but added this one to the wpmu db – no more error during install and smooth sailing between the two (except that I still need to put the cookies in, as it will not remember as whom I\’m logged in or if at all when switching between buddypress and bbpress… as an admin and a regular user this can become tricky).

not very helpful at this point (sorry about that), I know, and I dread the time that I will have to go through that setup again, but at least I made it work on this one

@trent – It may be a good idea to put direct links to all of the appropriate download versions that are needed in your original post. It is very confusing when there are 2 or 3 different releases of the same thing and a lot of people seem to be stuck on little mistakes like having the wrong version number (which you wouldn’t think is confusing, but it is!)

I’ve been over this entire post, and the posts linked off from it. Everything is working good, but the ability to have a forum post created by a group forum. And upon creating a new group, I get the error “Attention Site Admin: Group forums require correct setup and configuration of a bbPress installation.”

The couple of comments in here that have just this problem didn’t seem to get responses. Could this be my host, Media Temple DV, not allowing the rpc calls to the server?

On step 3 of the bbpress installation process where it asks for site name, I put in my main domain name (instead of the installation path to bbpress – which I now assume I should have put?).

I had errors during installation and so I deleted the whole bbpress directory and uploaded bbpress again to a new directory (domain.com/forums). Now when I run the installation and finish step 1, I say move to step 2 and it takes me to my main domain instead of step 2. I have no idea how to fix this. I guess the installation instructions from the first install still exist.

Dantes, if you view the forum via the groups page, then yes it will show up integrated into the BuddyPress group area. Otherwise, bbPress is its own application with its own plugins and theme files. You would need to create a theme to mimic the style of the rest of your website.

My problem during last installation with bbpress alpha 6 and buddypress 1 was that all users in bbpress were set to ‘inactive’ and only bbress admin could post on bbpress via buddypress group forum – so it’s another thing to check out if you run into problems with integration…

Iâ€™m using WPMU 2.7.1, BuddyPress 1.0, and bbPress 1.0-Alpha-6. Followed all install instructions, and voila! Logins are synchronized. Logging in to WPMU automagically logs me in to bbPress, and vice versa.

HOWEVERâ€¦

WHen I set up a new group within WPMU/BuddyPress, I *still* get the highly annoying â€œAttention Site Admin: Group forums require the correct setup and configuration of a bbPress installation.â€

I was using my admin user as the KeyMaster, also created another user (forumbridge) and tried setting him as the keymaster. No dice. Canâ€™t get the group forums to grokâ€“which was the entire point of this exercise.